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Indian Muffins
Take one quart of yellow cornmeal, and stir boiling water into it to make a thick batter. When cool add two ounces of butter, a little salt, and two eggs. Bake at once in small cakes on a griddle, and when one side is brown turn the cakes over. If liked, add a tea-spoonful of yeast, and make into a dough of soft consistency, which should be covered up in a warm place to rise. Bake in rings as soon as risen. The dough will take about two hours to rise. Sufficient, one muffin to each person.
Two recipes in one paragraph: a quick scalded-meal griddle cake, and a slower yeast-risen muffin baked in rings. Both hinge on scalding the meal properly.
- Scald the meal, and mean itWater at a full rolling boil poured over the cornmeal gelatinises the starch, which is what keeps these cakes from being gritty and crumbly. Water merely hot will not do it. Stir hard as you pour, then let the mush sit until it is warm rather than hot before the butter and eggs go in, or the eggs will scramble.
- A quart of cornmealFour to five cups depending on whether the quart is read as US or imperial, roughly 1¼ lb or 550-600 g. This is a large batch by modern standards; halving it is sensible. The boiling water is unmeasured, so add it gradually until the batter mounds on the spoon, since meals vary in grind and absorbency.
- Yellow cornmealOlder books call this Indian meal. Use a plain stone-ground or standard yellow cornmeal, not masa harina and not corn flour. A medium grind gives the best texture here; a coarse grind will stay sandy even after scalding.
- Griddle heatMedium, around 350–375F. Cornmeal batter with butter in it browns faster than a wheat pancake and burns before the centre sets if the griddle is hot. Give the first side three to four minutes and turn once only.
- A teaspoonful of yeastIn Victorian usage this most likely means compressed fresh yeast, roughly a teaspoon of the crumbled cake, though brewer's yeast is also possible. Use about a quarter teaspoon of instant dried yeast for a half batch. Add it once the scalded mush has cooled to blood heat, not before, or the heat will kill it.
- RingsMuffin rings are metal bands about 3½ inches across and an inch deep, set on the griddle and filled halfway. Egg rings or well-buttered tuna tins with both ends removed work identically. The dough is soft enough to need the ring to hold its shape.
- Two hours to riseThat is right for a cool Victorian kitchen. In a modern room at 70F the same dough will be ready in about an hour; judge it by a visible puff rather than the clock, since the heavy cornmeal will never double.
- YieldOne muffin per person is the book's reckoning. The full quart of meal makes roughly sixteen to eighteen muffins or a good many more griddle cakes. They are best straight off the griddle.
Cassell's calls these Indian muffins because Indian meal was the standard British and early American term for maize meal, distinguishing New World grain from the wheat, oats and barley that were simply called meal or flour. Scalding the meal is a standard trick in maize cookery, shared by cornmeal mush, spoonbread and hoecake alike: maize has no gluten, so the only structure available comes from gelatinised starch and, here, from two eggs. The quick griddle cake belongs to the older hearth tradition, while the yeasted version baked in rings applies the English muffin method to an imported grain.